Central Florida's Deseret cowboys head to national-championship rodeo

The 129th Silver Spurs Rodeo in Osceola County this weekend may seem like a quaint relic of a time and tradition shoveled aside for the not-so-wide-open spaces of the Orlando area's strip malls and subdivisions.

But cowboys and cattle remain an unmistakable part of Central Florida's landscape, especially on the Deseret Ranches' 290,000 acres, which are just a few minutes from Orlando's city limits and stretch across southeast Orange County and into Osceola and Brevard counties.

Deseret's cowboys have just finished their spring roundup, corralling, sorting, vaccinating and branding 42,000 cows and bulls and 35,000 calves.

Turns out the cowboys there are more than pretty good: a team of them recently won top honors in Florida's annual Working Ranch Cowboys Association rodeo in Arcadia and will compete in Amarillo, Texas, later this year for the national championship.

One of the team's members, Steven Wall, said working cowboys west of the Mississippi River are typically able to participate in more rodeos; they also get more on-the-job riding and roping practice, he said, because cattle spread out more across the vast, arid ranchland of Western states.

While some of the nearly 100 competitors at the Silver Spurs Rodeo in Kissimmee ride bulls and wrestle steers, the rodeos organized by the Working Ranch Cowboys Association are meant to more closely resemble the year-round job of managing a herd.

"The events basically mirror what you would do on a real, working cattle ranch," said Mandy Morton, the association's manager in Amarillo. "There's no need to run around barrels with a horse on a ranch, and you don't need to ride a bull, unless it's on a dare."

Instead, cowboys compete in sorting cows, chasing down strays, branding cattle (the brands are coated with chalk) and riding broncs using a regular, workaday saddle.

Also peculiar to the association's rodeos: a five-member team must consist of at least three members employed full time by the ranch they represent, and no more than two can be part-time hands — and even they must have earned at least $1,500 in the past year from the ranch they represent.

Tate Higginbotham, a South Florida rancher who organizes the state rodeo in Arcadia, said the Deseret team won the branding competition, did well in all the other events and has potential to compete with the best in a sport stereotyped as the pastime of Western U.S. states.

"We've been out to the championships in Amarillo and people asked us where we're from, and I said, 'We're from Florida,' and they said, 'There're cows in Florida?'" Higginbotham said. "It made me proud the first year we had a team out there, and we walked into the auditorium and saw that Florida flag."

Deseret Ranches, owned for nearly 60 years by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church, is more than an authentic cattle operation; it has the nation's largest herd of cattle and is among the nation's largest spreads with its 290,000 acres. Its cowboys aren't pretenders.

One of the team members, Gerald Burnette, said training for the ranch-rodeo events was simple: "I just grew up doing it."

Clint Vaughn, also on the team, added: "I was born and raised here. My dad's been here a little over 30 years, so I've been in and out of working here my whole life."